Best Expense Management Software 2025
Expense Management Software is designed to submit, process, reimburse, and track employee expenses. Typical features facilitate and automate invoicing and approval processes. Document management is usually contained in the software for capturing receipts and creating an audit trail. This allows administrators to approve expenses (e.g. for travel) and generate reports. More comprehensive software manages travel itinerary and add various levels of support for the transaction process, increasing ...
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What is Expense Management Software?
Expense Management Software is a financial product that allows users to submit, track, process, and reimburse employee expenses. It is also used to invoice billable hours and/or reimbursable project expenses.
Expense management capabilities are often found within broader accounting products, as well as in standalone tools. You may also be able to find these features bundled with tools for procurement, invoicing, budgeting, and other financial processes.
There are three main users of expense management software:
- Employees who submit their own expenses or project hours
- Administrators who review, approve, and report on employees' expenses.
- Bookkeepers or accountants who balance the general ledger or close the business’s books
Expense Management Software Features & Capabilities
Typical expense management features facilitate and automate invoicing and approval processes. Expense management software usually includes some document management for capturing receipts and creating an audit trail. This allows administrators to approve expenses (e.g. for travel) and generate reports.
Most expense management products should also include these core tracking and reporting capabilities:
- Receipt scanning and management
- Manual expense entry and administrative editing
- Mobile accessibility
- Customizable expense approval routing
- Expense tagging
- Configurable expense policies
- Basic expense reporting
- Integration with leading 3rd-party accounting systems
Many expense management products also offer additional features that can benefit companies depending on their scale and use case, including:
- In-system business cards or pay cards
- In-system reimbursement
- Budget limit enforcement
- Customizable reporting
- Integrations with large-scale financial systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning systems
Employee Reimbursement vs. Project Expense Invoicing
Though some tools span both use cases, products in this category are often more focused on either reimbursing internal employees or capturing time and resources spent on client projects, in order to generate expense invoices. These invoices may be for billable project hours (tracked against a project or contractor budget), or for reimbursable expenses, like materials used. In terms of this second use case, there is some overlap with time tracking software.
Expense Management Software Comparison
When comparing different expense management software, consider these factors:
- Level of automation vs. manual entry: How many of your business’s employees’ expenses can be automatically input, routed to the appropriate approver, and formatted for reporting? The ability of your expense management software to automate various functions and processes will become increasingly impactful as your business scales in size and number of discrete expenses. Product-offered pay cards, or prebuilt integrations with the company cards you already use, will significantly improve how easily you can automate these functions.
- Integrations: Most expense management software will be able to integrate with some external financial systems. However, they may not already integrate with your specific accounting system. Be sure to track which systems can natively integrate with your accounting, tax prep, or ERP software.
- Reporting capabilities: When evaluating expense management software, consider what prebuilt reporting capabilities each product offers, and how customizable the reporting features are. Your expense reporting needs may be affected by what regulatory bodies, external stakeholders, and internal leadership or management you report to. Given the range of possible reporting needs, not all products may be able to meet the same level of requirements.
Pricing Information
Expense management software is usually priced per user per month. The starting price is in the range of $5 to $10 per user per month. There are typically price breaks for large numbers of users. There may also be implementation costs if clients want to integrate with other business systems or build organization-specific workflows.